Member of Technical Staff, Backend

Runway is a research company pioneering new tools for human imagination. Runway has been at the forefront of multi-modal AI systems ensuring that the future of content creation is accessible, controllable and empowering for creatives. Runway’s mission is to ensure that anyone anywhere can tell their stories. We believe that deep learning techniques applied to audiovisual content will forever change art, creativity, and design tools.

Runway is leading a shift to generative media that is unlocking an unprecedented level of creative potential. The invention of the camera 200 years ago forever changed our world – AI is a new kind of camera that will reshape storytelling forever and lead to full feature films that are entirely generated.

About the role

We’re looking for a Software Engineer for our Backend team to help us build cutting-edge, AI-powered video creation and collaboration tools. Rather than specialists, we’re seeking curiosity-driven engineers who are determined problem solvers and thrive in fast-paced, high-ownership environments. Our engineering team is highly collaborative and works on a wide variety of exciting challenges, including building backend services for interactive video processing and streaming, and deploying cutting-edge computer vision and generative models to production.

A peek at our technical stack

Our video streaming backend components are written in Python, use a lot of FFmpeg/libav and HLS for on-the-fly transcoding, PyTorch and TorchScript for ML inference, and are deployed as containerized services on Kubernetes. Our API endpoints for real-time collaboration and media asset management are written in Typescript and Node.js and are deployed as serverless functions on AWS Lambda.

What you’ll do

• Work with a world-class engineering team pushing the boundaries of creativity and content creation on the browser
• Work across the Backend stack to implement new product features for Runway’s machine learning based video creation and collaboration tools
• Create server-side components using the latest in machine learning and graphics
• Improve the performance, reliability, and code quality of our codebases

What you’ll need

• 3+ years of industry experience in a software engineering role, ideally backend focused
• Demonstrated fluency of one or more programming languages, including Python, Node.js, or Rust
• Experience in architecting production-ready systems and familiarity with debugging and profiling tools
• Ability to rapidly prototype solutions and iterate on them with tight product deadlines
• Humility and open mindedness; at …